The Darkest Hour is Just Before the Dawn...

How do you know when dawn is approaching?  How do you know when it’s time to rise? How do you when that time is now? Is there some sort of cosmic alarm clock that goes off?  Does a reminder pop up on your phone? What does a wake-up call look like?  Mine was relatively subtle. It looked like a series of events, most of them involving alcohol and bad decisions.  Ultimately though, it was a voice, a quiet internal voice. My intuition, my deeper knowing, my core self. She speaks softly, and sometimes I need to step away from the outside noise to hear her, but she is always there and she always has something to say when I pay attention.

I think we expect healing to come in breakthroughs. A moment of clarity, a flash of brilliance, and suddenly everything falls into place. The clouds part, the sun shines, the birds sing, and life is perfect.

In my experience, nothing could be further from the truth.

Healing is a process. A long beautiful, painful, winding process, and one that I ran from for many years. I was a master at avoidance.

It’s fine.

My life was dominated by trauma cycles, triggers and reactions, and habits all carefully designed to keep me from looking within.  Within was a scary place.  Within was where I buried everything.  Within was where the monsters lived.  Why would I want to look there? When you’re a kid and you’re afraid, the last thing you want to do is look under the bed. That’s just wrong.

It’s fine. 

These cycles and habits and defenses were so ingrained that they were simply part of my operating system and completely off my radar. I had no idea how much of my life was on auto-pilot. I’d been so deeply asleep. These cycles and habits kept me from feeling my feelings, from facing my shadows, from finding myself. It was a fog that had settled in so slowly, I didn’t even realize that I couldn’t see through it. I just thought that this was life.

It’s fine.

My awakening has been slow. It kind of feels like those moments between being asleep and being awake. Lost in the depths of the fantasy. Not fully aware but not unconscious. Suspended in the space between dreams and reality. 

Sometimes, I want to stay in this dream. It’s comfortable here. There is a sense of safety and certainty here. But there is also a knowing. A knowing that there is more, that I want more, and that at some point, I will have to wake up. 

It’s fine.

The problem with being stuck in a trance is that you don’t realize you’re in a trance until something pulls you out of it.  Sometimes that pull is abrupt. Your lover leaves, you get laid off, you pinch a nerve doing yoga. Suddenly, the trance is broken, and you’re facing a completely new reality.  One you’re not ready for, and you don’t want to deal with.   

Most of the time, it’s more of a slow-moving awareness. Maybe it feels like butterflies in your belly or dreams that wake you up in the middle of the night. Maybe signs show up throughout your day-to-day activities, lyrics to songs that seem to know your story, quotes that pop up on social media, a flash of insight while you’re in the shower. It feels like something is clawing at you, trying to pry you open.  This is your intuition and she is desperately trying to reach you.

The awareness begins, the gnawing starts, and the light creeps in. I feel it working its way through my entire body, pulling me out of my trance.  It’s time to awaken my love, your life is waiting for you. 

Whatever your signs are, you feel it stirring.  Like the feeling of the sun’s warmth breaking through the clouds after a long rain.  You feel it, somewhere in your inner knowing, somewhere in your body, you just know.  

I’ve had times in my life where I’ve been jolted out of my trance and there have been other times it’s been a slow awakening. After losing my husband in 2013, I went through an intensely dark period. I just couldn’t deal with reality without him, so I buried myself along with him.

I buried it all–my emotions, my dreams, my desires, my heart…all of it. And, because I don’t do anything half-assed, after I buried it all, I piled a ton of shit on top just to be sure that nothing could ever surface.

It worked for a while. I was effectively numb to everything, floating through my day-to-day existence fully tranced. On the surface, everything looked great.  Most people who knew me probably thought I was struggling a bit, but I was good at looking okay. No real cause for alarm. After all, I was highly functioning. I looked successful, even happy.

I seemed fine.  

I hid my pain well. I shed my tears in darkness away from others’ judgment or pity. And because I had a lifetime of masking my emotions under my belt, I had become a master at which masks to wear at any given moment.

My awakening from this trance was slow, until it wasn’t. I knew I was spinning out of control and about to hit the wall, but I was also convinced that I had it all under control.

It was fine.

Until it wasn’t…